Thread: Is my SSD on the way out?

Grumpy, I use a program called Crystaldiskinfo which will look at the detailed stats from your drive including health.
I use another program called Crystaldiskmark8 that checks the Read/Write speed of each disk in your system. Interesting when comparing SATA 3Gbs HDD, SATA 6Gbs HDD, SATA SSD and NVME SSD.
I have never had a disk failure but am led to believe that you will probably change PC's before the SSD fails.
If you have not done so before, you can check to see if your drive has been Trimmed lately. Drive Properties, then tools.
I have never used the Windows score.
You may also find that your system is bogged down running tasks not needed. You can check this stuff with Task Manager.
People used to re-install Windows previously to get rid off bloat but it is a pain in the ?

Jigsaw

"People used to re-install Windows previously to get rid off bloat but it is a pain in the ?"

Have a read up on a cleaning program "Bleachbit".
I use it occasionally without problems, but I recommend a restore point before running.
I hit "Preview" first just to see what will happen.

Use this to trim all the cruft out: GitHub - Sycnex/Windows10Debloater: Script to remove Windows 10 bloatware.

Its excellent, but more of an advanced user tool. It will rip all the spying, adware and "unremovable" components roots and all.



As far as TRIM, set it to be automatic.

Run "Disk Clean Up" occasionally and use the "Clean up System files" option to remove all the old update files.


As far as Disk-Deadness, use an SSD drive utility to see the wear level - Download CrystalDiskInfo latest release

Unless its dying horribly, I'd be inclined to leave it be. They self administer the blocks, even with a high level of wear and/or death.

Occasionally it is worth seeing if the manufacturer has any firmware to update.


Lastly, re-gooze ALL the heatsinks. Pull the board out and dismount the sinks carefully (usually just plastic pins), remove the TERRIBLE tape they use and use a half-decent goo to sauce it back up. Magic!

Re-Do the CPU while you are there.

The number of "dead" PCs and laptop I've fixed for people where the gooze was hard-as-a-rock is unreal.

As to your Win Experience score, that's probably related to SATA 3 SSD's poor read/write performance compared to newer NVMe/PCIe & Optane SSDs.

I have noticed that every year or two when I look at my PC's score it's lower 'n lower every time, although I know damned well the HW is perfectly healthy.

Thanks for all the feedback everyone. One thing I neglected to stat in the OP is that I leave my PC on 24/7 as my backups are performed in the wee small hours of the night. At the suggestion of a poster on another forum where I posted this question I do a complete shutdown of the PC at least once during the day now. This seems to have reduced the sluggish behavior by a substantial amount.

CrystalDisk.jpg

OK... One thing that occurs to me is to ask when was the OS last shut down completely?

I don't mean the "Shutdown" cmd from the Windows Menu or elsewhere, which since the days of Win8 or thereabouts actually sends your 'puta into a type of hibernation mode instead. (It basically saves a RAM snapshot to drive so it can pick up from where it left off at the next 'boot.')

I mean a proper, old school shutdown where the system does a full reboot, reloading all drivers, etc. and all extraneous processes that have crept in are left for dead.

Here, I do this using the cmd 'shutdown /s /t 2' but just selecting _Restart_ instead of _Shutdown_ in the power menu does pretty much the same thing, with the notable exception that the computer does, of course, start again.

Stupid, isn't it?

But definitely worth a try; it'll often 'speed up' an older 'puta. For a while...

Thanks for that info Skew, I normally do the Shutdown from the popup options, but I'll try the command line version and see if that speeds things up.
Just out of interest what do the " /s /t 2 " switches do?

Shutdown.jpg

/s is the shutdown command. /r for reset. /t 2 is the number of seconds delay before the command is executed, in this case two seconds.

You could make a .bat batch file with the reset command and get task scheduler to run it once a day/week when it suits.

Originally Posted by apple8

/s is the shutdown command. /r for reset. /t 2 is the number of seconds delay before the command is executed, in this case two seconds.

You could make a .bat batch file with the reset command and get task scheduler to run it once a day/week when it suits.

Thanks mate, exactly how would I do that.

Another thought if it wasn’t really necessary to run 24/7 you could do a programmed full shut down in Task Scheduler and go into the bios settings and set a time to start the PC.

I did this with a solar logger, to shut down at 8pm and startup at 5:30am and it worked quite well. I also changed the bios to always restart after a power loss.

Every one has different ideas on backups and strategies. Here is my take.
I have 3 copies of all of my data. One in the PC and 2 external drives. I external drive kept on site and one off site.
This caters for, someone stealing your PC. A fire in your house destroying the PC and one External drive.
I would not keep a backup on a separate disk in the same PC as for the above but also just in case you have a virus etc that trashes all drives within the box.

I have an SSD (C drive) with progams installed (no data to speak of).
I use Macrium Reflect (free) to back this up to 2 external drives on a needs basis i.e. before Windows Updates etc. It creates a system image file.

I have a 4TB Data drive in the PC for all of my data.
I back this up regularly (which could be daily) to 2 external drives using the Free File Sync program.
I have it setup to compare the data on the PC data drive to the External drive. I have it setup in mirror mode to keep both drives the same.
It only needs to write the data files that have changed to the backup drives. It is extremely quick.

Macrium Reflect paid version can do both types of backup but I find my approach easier to use.

I also use Macrium Reflect to clone system drives when updating them. I Just upgraded a laptop from a 250GB SSD to 500GB SSD.
You usually want to increase the size of the system partition but other partitions the same.
Jigsaw